Monitoring Your Servers for Free (Part 4)

It has certainly been a month of monitoring blog posts over here! I have been running a little behind schedule thanks to this chest cold I caught, however I’m on my way to recovery and with a little coffee and determination we’ll get back to it! This post will be the epic conclusion of our monitoring your servers for free series. For this demonstration we will use the Turn Key Linux virtual appliance for Observium built on top of Debian Wheezy. If you’d like to install Observium on your RHEL or CentOS server, instructions can be found at http://www.observium.org/wiki/RHEL_Installation

Download & Deploy TurnKey Linux Observium Virtual Appliance

To download the appliance visit http://www.turnkeylinux.org/observium. You will have several choices as to what format you want to download the appliance in. If you are using Hyper-V I would recommend using the ISO, however since I will be using VMware ESXi 5.5 we will download the OVA template. Once it’s downloaded to your local machine follow the steps below:

Unzip the OVA template

Open vSphere client and click File>Deploy OVF Template

In the Deploy OVF Template wizard click Browse and point to the OVF template you unzipped

Proceed through the remaining steps in the wizard customizing as appropriate for your environment

Power on the Turnkey VM and open the console

Proceed through the setup wizard for the virtual appliance

Prepare Windows Servers for Observium

Before we can begin reporting data to Observium, we must first ensure that we have enabled SNMP. This can either be done through server manager using the add roles/features wizard. In addition you will need to ensure that the hostname the servers you’re monitoring can be resolved Observium, this may require entries into your local DNS server if DNS entries do not already exist, or entries into the /etc/hosts on the Observium server.

Install SNMP (see above)

Restart the Server (the SNMP options needed aren’t active until after reboot)

Open Services (run command: services.msc)

Double click the SNMP service

Click the Security Tab

Add a community name (ie: Observe)

Add the IP of the Observium server to the “Accept SNMP packets from these hosts” list

Open a browser and navigate to your Observium server’s web page and login

Under the devices menu choose add device

Provide the hostname

Choose SNMP v1

Enter SNMP community name set in step 6 and click add device

Wait a few minutes for Observium to begin collecting data on your new server

Monitoring Linux Servers and Cisco Equipment

While I typically use New Relic for Linux monitoring, Observium has published instructions for adding Linux servers. Additionally there are also instructions available for adding Cisco switches and firewalls. Again the gotcha here is that A records must exist in local DNS or entries must be created in /etc/hosts on the Observium server, as all devices are managed by hostname not by IP.

2 comments on “Monitoring Your Servers for Free (Part 4)”

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